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MSI K9N DIAMOND Mainboard Review

Cinebench 9.5; SPECapc^SM for 3ds Max™ 8; SPECviewperf® 9.0.3 Benchmarks and Conclusions

Cinebench 9.5

GFX 4CD	CB 1 CPU	CB X CPU	OPG SL	OGL HL
482	439	807	2030	4829

SPECapc^SM for 3ds Max™ 8

SPECviewperf® 9.0.3

3dsmax-04	catia-02	ensight-03	light-07	maya-02	proe-04	sw-01	ugux-01	tcvis-01
27.73	32.88	22.36	29.73	83.65	27.03	41.76	11.11	18.23

Conclusions

Well what more can we say than - WHOW!

The bios set-up is now very cleverly automated so that even the most basic upgrader can achieve all without having to worry about which speed FSB and Voltage settings are needed.   Its all done for you.   For the overclockers, well lets just say, with the right memory from Corsair and the correct hard drives from Western Digital you have one a screaming machine.   The manuals currently supplied by MSI on each mainboard are feature rich and have a lot of good stab points in them and they take time and effort to point out many salient points.   Finally companies are starting to learn that a good manual makes a good beginning to us all.

Throughout the whole set of tests and benchmarks we paid very careful attention to the Akasa EVO BLUE (AK922) HSF from Akasa and overall system cooling as this 6000+ CPU draws one amount of power.     The mainboard system temperatures remained within a scope of 33.5C to 35.9C and silence was golden.   So, you will be asking what about this CPU we all have heard on how hot it gets?   Once more we watched this area with care and after completing a 5 run Burn in Pass utilising SiSoftware 2007 with SP1 we see the following returns.    These figures should put to bed now any questions relating to this particular Heatsinks efficiency.

Our last outing with the new Western Digital Hard Drives took you all totally by surprise and many claimed that these were freak one off results that could not be repeated.   Sorry, you all got that wrong as the drives once more performed remarkably at everything that was thrown at them.   The Burst speeds shown are a few MB/S slower then previously recorded on the Intel 965 platform though what is interesting is that the Average Read speeds are nearly identical.   It just goes to show that these really are exceptionally powerful hard discs.

With Diskeeper you really do enter a new realm of performance and reliability.   With its InvisiTasking™ technology, Diskeeper 2007 handles fragmentation on the go, as it occurs, in real time ensuring that your system is kept at top performance levels 100% of the time - automatically!    Install Diskeeper 2007 and let the disk defragger software do the rest.   We have tested this on many applications and benchmarks whilst it ran in the background and did not see any performance drop.   So for those of you who worry about fragmentation running on the fly, then worry not, as this is a thing of the past.   However to reiterate this automation process of Diskeeper was disabled in accordance with the fair play rules.

The new memory from Corsair has most certainly played its part too as the tests shown earlier have provided some interesting results in the Sandra 2007 SP1 Memory throughput and Latency tests.    Though its overall performance helped dramatically with the systems I/O in SPEC and Cinebench.   Yes a few bucks more but bang for buck you have to seriously consider these strong advantages that have been shown.   To maintain optimal performance then one should run with the most suited components shown.

This is a mainboard that is feature rich and will appeal to many end users across a wide variety of disciplines.   One thing we did not have time to complete was the mainboards 8 channel onboard audio though this would appear on paper to be very good indeed and allow for a multitude of speaker set-ups for all the different audio selections you can think of.

At going to print current SRP pricing of the MSI K9N Diamond is approximately £115.00p to £135.00 including Vat and is available now from several different companies online for example here.

As a workstation platform it really has stood up to the vicious tests etc we have thrown at it.   For a week now it has never faltered once and taking into account its price point you have got yourself a winning mainboard for not a lot of your hard earned cash.   This will most certainly appeal to the SoHo users who like to build their own base studio systems.

Finally, this new mainboard from MSI has now firmly taken the place of its predecessor and will remain in situ here for a long time to come over the coming months when so much is due to appear.   It takes a lot to impress us here and MSI have most certainly shown us what it can produce covering both Intel and AMD mainboard platforms.

www.3dprofessor.org award for the MSI K9N Diamond – AM2 Desktop Mainboard

5 out of 5 Editors Choice

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Mainboard Pictures
Page 3 - System Configuration, Benchmarks and Software Used
Page 4 - SiSoftware 2007 SP1 and Hard Drive Tach 3.0.1.0 - Journalists Edition
Page 5 - PCMark 2005 Advanced with build 1.2.0 and 3D Mark 2006 Advanced with build 1.1.0
Autodesk® 3ds Max® 8 with SP3
Page 6 - Cinebench, SPEC Benchmarks and Conclusions

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